Catch the Butterfly, if you can

MANILA, Philippines — If the night-after-night standing ovation the audience has accorded M. Butterfly ever since it opened last week is any indication, the ongoing Philippine run of the Tony award-winning play is a surefire delight to Filipino theatergoers.

Love, passion and deception take center stage at the Maybank Performing Arts Theater in BGC as M. Butterfly flutters with all the elements that make the play gripping (what with daring scenes) and fascinating (what with an opulent parade of beautiful kimonos and other costumes scene after scene). The material that David Henry Hwang wrote and won Best Play at the 1988 Tony Awards has faithfully remained powerful and enthralling in the hands of Kanakan Balintagos.

M. Butterfly is a three-act tale of love between Rene Gallimard, a French diplomat assigned in China, and Song Liling, a Peking opera singer. In the web of their love is a tapestry of trickery, tumult and transformation. Tragedy has never looked so good until M. Butterfly flutters around in the consciousness of the viewers. How can something so saccharine, like love and passion, be so tragic?

Kanakan, whose hands were cold and clammy during the press preview and colder and clammier during the gala night of M. Butterfly, has a steady grip on his personal and political understanding of the play. Seamless is his direction, making sure that each blocking is not only resplendent in its simplicity but also evocative of complex emotions. His use of the kurogos, the props men in traditional Japanese theater, is a muted drama in itself because the characters in solid black, moving like bunraku dolls, foretell the progression of the story the way the chorus does in a Shakespearean play.

Kanakan’s blockings on a stage bisected by an elevated plank that divides East and West allow the viewer to freeze a scene or two on his mind and he will understand the play’s complexity and nuances. Kanakan, formerly called Auraeus Solito of the acclaimed indie film Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros, has the uncanny ability to beguile you in one instance and shock you the next — then you are privy further to his depth.

This depth is transcended into the consciousness of RS Francisco, who essays with dexterity the role of Song Liling, the same role he played almost three decades ago in the Dulaang UP production of M. Butterfly directed by Tony Mabesa. (Mabesa chose to sit down as he wiped his tears at the end of the gala show last week while the rest of the audience, including US Ambassador Sung Kim, Cinema Evaluation Board chairman Christine Dayrit and businesswoman Robina Gokongwei-Pe, were giving the play a standing ovation).

The Song Liling of RS in his reprise role is grittier, more daring and shocking, more compelling and unnerving, proof of his maturity as an actor. He uninhibitedly saunters into the stage like a feline being and ends his characterization with a roar of emotions. RS is a dynamo in M. Butterfly — silent yet explosive. His smirk, or the simple dilating of his chinky eyes, or even the way he opens his fan reveals so much about the character he plays. He does not need a line for his Song Liling to personify ruse and reality. But when he opens his mouth, he carries you the world all his own.

When RS bares his heart and soul and all at the end of the play, quiescence rules the theater. Heartbeats run faster, faster than the way French-born actor Olivier Borten can come up with a solution to his emotional misery as Rene Gallimard. Olivier’s performance reveals that he is a habitué of the stage. The gradation of his emotions can be put in a scale and it will clearly define his bravado in acting. He displays love and feels it like it is the air that he breathes — all this and more he gives to the audience as he makes Gallimard a character hard to forget.

And who can forget Pinky Amador, who plays Helga? Sensitive and sincere, that’s what she is. Her Helga is a beautiful canvas of longing and pain.

Save for the lapel problem during the press preview and gala night — that explains the cold and clammy hands of Kanakan — M. Butterfly flutters gracefully on stage. The rest of the cast performs their respective roles with encompassing brilliance — so luminous and vivid is the voice of Rica Nepomuceno (as the Opera Singer) that I still hear her in my head.

M. Butterfly — with garnishes of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, Peking opera and kabuki — will not deceive in its theme of delusion, which masquerades as love and passion. It is exquisitely staged. And I heard the sound problem has already been perfectly addressed.

It helps to know that for such a complex play that M. Butterfly is, all its proceeds until its last run on Sept. 30 will simply go to different institutions and charities. And for that, kudos to the generous hearts of play producers RS Francisco’s Frontrow and Tony award-winner Jhett Tolentino.

Catch the butterfly — if you can — in M. Butterfly.